Greater New Orleans

Doug Williams, shown here reacting to a play during the Bayou Classic 2012 football game in New Orleans, was one of two head coaches fired by Grambling State University football during the school's tumultuous 2013 football season. (Photo by Brett Duke, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune)
(NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

Think about how you would function with...40% of your household income." -- Felicia M. Henry, president of a Grambling State alumni chapter

According to The Courtbouillon, the student newspaper at Dillard University, about 1,200 students are taking classes on the Gentilly campus this fall. That's about a 43 percent drop from the nearly 2,100 students enrolled at the private university 10 years ago. Hurricane Katrina hit Dillard hard, and if you visited campus soon after, you could sense the loss by attending a University Choir concert. Traditionally, the choir concludes its concerts by wrapping around the interior of Lawless Memorial Chapel and surrounding the audience with song. But in a concert I attended some years after the storm, the choir wasn't big enough to encircle the crowd. The shrunken choir illustrated Dillard's distress more poignantly than statistics ever could.

Similarly, the reduction of Grambling State University's once proud football team to virtual tackling dummies for its opponents should be seen as emblematic of problems plaguing the whole campus. The football team is the reason the school has a national profile, and there's no reason to believe that the administration - its history of mismanagement notwithstanding - would choose to let the university's showpiece tarnish. We can conclude, then that a shabby, ill-prepared and hapless Tigers football team is indicative of more pervasive problems at Grambling State.

In a season that included the firing of former head coach Doug Williams and the firing of Williams' replacement, an 0-7 start and reports of an administration deaf to the team's concerns regarding the safety of its facilities and cleanliness of its equipment, the Tigers refused to travel to Mississippi to play Jackson State University Saturday. That eighth loss of the season, a forfeit, was the most embarrassing yet, in that it drew more negative attention to the university than being outscored 276-93 over seven games ever could.

But check out what Felicia M. Henry, president of the Douglas L. Williams chapter of the Grambling University National Alumni Association, says in a link found on the university's website: "Grambling has been in a state of financial emergency for a while now," Henry writes. "Between 2008 and June of 2013, the State of Louisiana and University of Louisiana System, in which we are governed, cut the university's budget almost 60%, by approximately $17 million. Think about how you would function with JUST 40% of your household income. Some improvements might have been made budget-wise in the latest portion of this year, but GRAMBLING is STILL STRUGGLING!"

Andre Perry, who recently left a position at Loyola University for a deanship at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Mich., was on Twitter and Facebook last week expressing frustration at reports that focused on Grambling's football problems to the exclusion of everything else. The boycott, he wrote in one tweet, is "bigger than the game and university." The state's budget cuts have hit its universities hard and its black universities especially hard. Perry also added that he thinks we care too much about football.

Our football obsession can't be denied, but if the team's walkout draws attention to drastic budget cuts, maybe this is an instance where a football fixation actually proves useful. According to Sports Illustrated, which published a story about Grambling on its website Friday, "Approximately 127 staff members have been laid off since 2008 and furloughs are common. Professors have also been asked to teach an extra class each year for free." Leon Sanders, Grambling's vice president for finance, told Sports Illustrated that the school has "cut to the bone."

Nobody much cares about staffing depletions or professors being asked to volunteer their time. But the team Eddie Robinson built into a national powerhouse reduced to a laughing stock? That's a reason for outrage!

It isn't that Perry is wrong to shake his head at our focus on football, but if Grambling State's football team didn't have such a winning tradition, it's unlikely that Grambling's problems would be getting any attention at all.

Dillard's choir is reportedly getting back up to size. That's good to hear. Not because the choir is the most important thing at the university but because its success suggests a more thriving campus. The same goes for the football team at Grambling. Of course, a winning football team doesn't necessarily mean all is well. But when the school's best-known program can't even be counted on to show up, you can be sure that the whole campus is in trouble.